In late December 1974, a music store owner in Minneapolis named Chris Weber got a phone call. A friend of his wanted to know if Weber could round up some local musicians and book a recording studio, so that the friend’s brother could record a few songs. Without much to go on, Weber chose some jazz players who he knew could play just about anything. He gathered this impromptu band at a place in town called Sound80. They were just getting settled when Bob Dylan walked in.
He was the most famous musician in the world, and he was under pressure. He hadn’t had a hit record in several years. He had just finished a grueling tour. He had recently switched record labels. With expectations for a new album impossibly high, Dylan had been recording with a top-flight producer at CBS Studios in New York, with some of the best musicians in the business. But the sessions had been difficult, and the rumors were flying: Dylan was off his game; the material was depressing; the producer was a control freak; the musicians were unhappy.
Somehow, they had gotten it done. Ten new songs had been recorded, and the new Bob Dylan album was headed for production in time for a Christmas release date. That is, until Dylan headed home to Minnesota for the holidays, had a change of heart, and decided to scrap half of it.
When Dylan arrived at Sound80, there was hardly time for everyone to get acquainted. Dylan taught five songs to Weber, who quickly ran the band through them. And then – so the legend goes – everybody just stepped up to their microphones and kinda winged it.
On the night of December 27, they recorded two songs: “Idiot Wind,” a brutal account of love gone horribly wrong, and “You’re a Big Girl Now,” an epic tribute to self-pity. In a second session on December 30, they tore through all sixteen verses of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” recorded the heartbreaking, “If You See Her Say Hello,” and then nailed Dylan’s magnum opus, “Tangled Up in Blue.”
These five songs were sent off to New York. Columbia Records swapped out the versions previously recorded, re-mastered the album, and immediately went to press. And forty years ago this week, on January 20, 1975, Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” hit record shelves. It was an instant classic, an emotional thunderbolt and perhaps the finest album of Dylan’s career. One reviewer called it, “the truest, most honest account of a love affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape.”
But here’s the thing: when the album was re-mastered at the last minute, the album jackets had already been printed. So the packaging and the liner notes include the New York personnel, but not the Minneapolis musicians. And that’s how five of the best songs on one of the most definitive albums in rock history remain…uncredited.
What a bummer. But one that can be rectified. Here they are, the unknown impromptu band that have been tearing at your heartstrings for the last forty years:
Bill Berg – Drums
Gregg Inhofer – Keyboards
Kevin Odegard – Guitar
Peter Ostroushko – Mandolin
Billy Peterson – Bass
Chris Weber – Guitar
Paul Martinson – Engineer
Bravo, gentlemen.
the quick Sliver 